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San Francisco's famous general strike of 1934 followed a long period of union decline, including the formerly powerful AFL unions of San Francisco. By the time the Depression was several years underway, living standards had declined precipitously and many people felt pushed to the wall. The longshoremen of San Francisco had been well organized and relatively well rewarded during the boom decade following the earthquake, but by the mid-'teens, the Chamber of Commerce unleashed a major assault on union power. In September 1919, the Pacific coast shipowners moved in and smashed the maritime unions. "They sent ambulance loads of pickets to the hospital" and harnessed the post WWI/Russian Revolution hysteria to their cause, wrote Mike Quin in his memorial anthology On The Drumhead.
A November 1933 government report indicated that approximately 50% of working longshoremen were on relief rolls at any given time, due to the precarious nature of the work and the prevailing low wages. Meanwhile, government subsidies rolled in to the coffers of shipping companies (e.g., the SF-based Dollar Steamship Company received ocean mail contracts in 1928 totaling nearly $30 million over ten years with only 26 trips required per year. The industry as a whole was receiving upwards of $70 million per year). Even worse than the low living standards was the arbitrary and humiliating "shape-up" by which gang bosses doled out work to their favorites and punished the honest and the agitators alike. Organizing among longshoremen led to the emergence of of a mimeographed bulletin, the Waterfront Worker, in late 1932. When the US Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in the summer of 1933, section 7(a) gave legal impetus for independent unions. In July and August 1933, 95% of the longshoremen along the west coast deserted the Blue Book and rejoined the ILA. But the explicit legal protection of the NIRA offered no guarantees and the longshoremen knew they would have to prove their strength to improve their conditions. Radicals and communists, including Harry Bridges who was propelled to a leadership role by the events to follow, called for rank-and-file control of the union and the hiring halls. When the ILA made an agreement with the employers to raise wages from 75 cents to 85 cents an hour and for shared control of hiring halls, the rank and file rejected it. The new union militants held a convention in San Francisco in February 1934 for all the ILA longshoremen along the west coast. The workers met for ten days but excluded paid union officials as delegates. While they elected old officials to coordinate the West Coast organizing campaign, they also resolved that no agreement could be valid unless approved by a rank-and-file vote. They also put forth five de-mands: companies' full recognition of the union, union-controlled hiring halls to replace the shape-up, a raise in pay from $.85 to $1.30/hr., a 30-hour week, and a coast-wide agreement covering all US ports and expiring at the same time. They also passed three important resolutions which strengthened their new power and self-confi-dence: a call for a waterfront confederation of all marine workers, including teamsters; rank-and-file gang committees to handle grievances instead of business agents; and opposition to arbitration since it always led to defeat. The employers refused to deal with the convention and its demands on the grounds that it was communist-dominated. They assumed that the conservative leaders of the ILA, local leader William Lewis and national ILA president Joseph Ryan, would conclude favorable agreements preserving their accustomed power and profits, but they were in for a shock. The longshoremen set a strike date of March 23 and elected a 25-man committee to organize it. The day before the scheduled walkout, President Roosevelt sent a telegram asking that it be postponed so that a fact-finding commission might conduct an investigation, but a communist longshoreman, Sam Darcy predicted that it was actually to ensure "a plentiful supply of student scabs" when the college semester ended later. ILA leader Lewis accepted the president's request anyway and after six weeks of secret negotiations concluded another unfavorable agreement. The stevedores rejected it again and unanimously set a new strike date of May 9. Despite urgent appeals from ILA president Ryan and the federal government, the strike began on schedule and within a couple of days seamen were streaming off ships on their own strike and all the ports along the west coast were shut down. San Francisco Teamsters overruled their local president and refused to move cargo to or from the struck port. READ MORE:
All Photos courtesy the San Francisco Library History Room |
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